Electrochemical studies on silver bimetallic cathode materials for long life batteries

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Due to the current energy crisis going across the globe, scientific community is continuously in search for alternate sources of energy. One of the potential solutions to handle this crisis situation is to look for electrical sources of energy such as batteries. Inside a battery, chemical energy is converted into electrical energy by means of an electrochemical reaction. At present, lithium batteries seem to be a good example due to their various advantages. Lithium batteries are currently being used to meet the power demands of electronics industry such as in laptops, digital cameras, and cellular devices etc. The reasons these batteries are in great demand today are high voltage of 3.6 V, high specific energy of 200 Wh/kg, and high calendar life of 10 years. In this research work, we focused on the lithium batteries in which Silver Vanadium Oxyphosphate (SVOP-1) Ag 2 VO 2 PO 4 , Silver Vanadium Oxide (SVO) Ag 2 V 4 O 11 , acts as the cathode and lithium metal as the anode. At present, these batteries are being used in implantable cardiac defibrillators and artificial pacemakers for biomedical applications. Therefore, it becomes important to understand the proper functioning and electrochemical mechanism of these batteries. An understanding of the reduction mechanism will help us in knowing proper functioning, performance and reliability of these battery systems. We addressed this problem by first synthesizing the SVOP-1 material using reflux and hydrothermal routes. After that, the material was characterized using Brunauer Emmett and Teller (BET), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), particle size analyzer, optical microscopy, and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) successfully. To understand the reduction mechanism of Li-SVOP(reflux) and Li-SVOP(hydrothermal) battery systems, we calculated thermodynamic parameters such as enthalpy, entropy and Gibb’s free energy of lithium intercalation. We also did thermodynamic studies on other systems such as Silver Vanadium Oxide (SVOP-3) Ag 2 VP 2 O 8 , Silver Hollandite Ag 1.6 Mn 8 O 16 (high silver) and Silver Hollandite Ag 1.07 Mn 8 O 16 (low silver). A long term storage study to understand the effect of direct current resistance (R.D.C.) and effect of ohmic, anodic, and cathodic resistances as a function of storage time was carried out. AC-Impedance technique was used to understand some of the complex electrochemical processes inside SVOP-1 system synthesized using reflux and hydrothermal routes. Effect of temperature and intermediate energy removal from these batteries (depth of discharge DOD expressed in percentage %) was also studied on the Li-SVOP battery systems using AC-Impedance technique. Activation energy (Ea, J/mol) was calculated as a function of DOD% using Arrhenius relationship from the literature. In addition to this, we also carried out studies as a function of discharge time to understand the reduction mechanism in greater detail. We did quantification of silver using X-Ray diffraction, thick pellet sectioning, constant potential and AC-Impedance testing on Li-SVOP(reflux) battery systems. Keywords: SVOP, AC-Impedance, Depth of discharge (DOD), Implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICDs)